“That’s a lot of people,” jokes Guster vocalist/guitarist Ryan Miller in response to his band’s performance the prior evening at Boston’s colossal City Hall Plaza where a record release party was held for the band’s fourth studio album, Keep It Together. “All the city people said there were 45,000 people there, but I found that a little hard to believe,” adds Miller.
Even if there were only 35,000 people in attendance, there’s no doubt these fans could offer nearby Fenway Park a run for its bleacher space. As Boston Mayor Thomas Menino introduced the band as “his good friends “Goose-ter,” the crowd let out an apprehensive roar amongst many laughs, following the neglectfulness of Boston’s head honcho.
Guster has come quite a long way from their days in the early 90’s when Ryan Miller, Adam Gardner and Brian Rosenworcel first played together within the crammed dorms of Tufts University on the outskirts of Boston, MA. With two lead guitars and vocals (Miller and Gardner) along with Rosenworcel, who plays bongos and congas with nothing but his hands; Guster has made a name for itself as one of modern rocks most endearing pop/rock songwriting talents, following in the footsteps of pop maestros Crowded House and Squeeze. The trio has sold thousands of records and toured with such luminaries as the Dave Matthews Band, Bob Dylan and The Barkenaked Ladies. Although many music pundits have found their lack of jam friendly excursions to fall short of their smart pop sensibilities, Guster has grown an alluring following with just the bare necessities: Two voices, two guitars and a percussion set-up, although recently the band has added another touring musician.
Although the trademark harmonies are alive and well on Keep It Together, the group has made a sincere effort to branch beyond those bare necessities to include drum kits, bass guitars, oboes, clarinets, banjos and vintage keyboards. It marks their most mature sounding effort to date, one that takes cues from influences past and present, but still sounds “Guster.” We recently had the chance to speak with lead singer/guitarist Ryan Miller following Guster’s grand Boston performance to discuss Keep It Together and various interesting side topics.
Many of Guster’s songs have already built an identity of their own as “timeless classics.” When you were growing up, were there songs that had a particular staying power with you?
There are certainly songs that are part of my musical history that will always be there. I mean, some of them are there purely out of nostalgia, you know like [Pat Benatar’s] “Love is a Battlefield.” I mean, that will always have a place in my heart, not because it’s an incredible song but, then “A Day in the Life” or something by the Beatles will have a place because I remember when I heard that while I was growing up. That’s a song that will endure forever, so I hope that when people remember our songs as part of their musical history, that we are more Beatles and less Pat Benatar (laughs).
Many bands, like Strangefolk for instance, build their songs on two to three-part harmonies, but were unfortunately, never able to get over the commercial hump. Yet Guster has been able to, and even open for the Dave Matthews Band and the Barenaked Ladies. Do you attribute your success to coming from a large city like Boston, that helped you get your music out there?
Yeah, I do think Boston helped us out early on, because there were a lot of college kids. So we would play, and we were really lucky to be in Boston because people would go to school there and go home for the summer and take our music with them, and kind of hear it that way. So, the first few times we played on the west coast, there were just a lot of east coasters and that really helped get the seed planted in a lot of places. I think we’re really fortunate to have been big in Boston first, because it’s notoriously a difficult market to sort of crack into. So I think that had a lot to do with it, and obviously luck…and then our tenacity. We’ve been playing for a long time, many years basically, and we keep touring and touring and touring. The thing was, it eventually got bigger little steps at a time, which is always encouraging, as if we are doing the right thing.
Starting a band with two acoustic guitarists and a percussionist is typically associated with a rustic sound, more coffeehouse and small club environment. When you were starting out, did you ever feel, because of your instrumentation, that you wouldn’t graduate beyond the coffeehouse and small club level?
I don’t think we had any great ambition for the band when we started. If we did, I don’t think it probably would have been two guitars and a percussionist. Those are the instruments that we played when we met each other in college, and kind of went with it. And then we thought maybe we won’t get a bass player, and Brian’s style evolved, and our style evolved and it’s constantly evolving with the new record and now bass drums. And now the question is, ‘could I have ever anticipated where the band would be ten years later;’ a firm no, I had no idea where we would end up.
It’s been awhile since Lost and Gone Forever came out in the fall of ‘99, and that was actually a commercial breakthrough for you guys. Did you have feelings of ‘how the hell do we top that one?’
Well, kind of. It’s all relative, I mean from an industry standpoint it was a failure, and our record label lost money on that record. We were really pleased it sold 200,000 copies, which was really good and we’re relatively proud of it. Meanwhile, the John Mayer’s of the world sell three million copies, so you never have that moment where you look around at each other and say, ‘hey, we finally made it.’ Even though with all the stuff that’s going on, and the sort of big promotional machine that’s cranking up behind us now, we still have a lot of work to do and there’s still a lot we want to accomplish. I think if we can get what we did in Boston last night, which was amazing, but when we go to New Mexico and there are three hundred people showing up there, which is fine, and we have a very strong desire and drive to bring our music everywhere, and I have lots of friends who play in bands who play to fifteen people in their hometown, so I’m not gonna try and say I’m not successful or I’m not appreciative of where we are, but there’s still a lot of work we want to do.
Has Guster considered going the MTV route, or have you already tried that?
We just made a video, and just to be kind of cheap, we did it on the fly and went to Amsterdam and did it. It’s just another way of being creative, and hopefully people will see it in different ways. And I think it is kind of a long shot, but it’s a nice thing to have.
Do you see the video format as an appropriate way of artistically expressing yourself?
Yeah, the dynamic of making a video is so difficult. It’s a really hard thing to do well and you really have to trust the director, because as musicians, you really don’t know that much about making videos. So, it’s fun though…I really like videos, and I think we try to have a good time in our video and show our sense of humor, and we’ll see how that turns out.
On the new release Keeping It Together, the band experiments with a drum kit, bass guitar, clarinet, vintage keyboards and other instruments previously never fully used in a Guster record. Why the sudden influx of new instruments?
We never started off as being minimalists, saying, ‘we’re just going to do guitars and bongos.’ As we sort of progressed musically, we felt real limited to this sort of, basically, it was like someone saying, ‘here is your canvas and you have green and blue to paint with.’ We’ve spent a lot of time painting with green and blue, and after we made our last record and we sat down to write, we were like, ‘what if we want to start with a bass line? What if Brian wants to play a drum kit? What if we want to play keyboards here?’ So, there have never been rules that were designed by anybody else. I mean we don’t have any rules on how we can play our records and what we can do live, so it’s sort of an evolution creatively on how we wanted to express ourselves.
And Brian finally got his stab at a drum kit?
Yeah, Brian finally broke down.
How did you get him to switch over from bongos to the kit?
It was him actually. He was feeling a little cramped in the instrumentation because he wasn’t able to get in the pocket and groove. It was really his creative decision to move over to the kit.
His style of playing the drums on the new album sounds like Yo La Tengo, in terms of it almost sounding like a drum machine, especially on the opening tune “Diane,” which has an almost ‘80’s feel to it.
We kind of got ‘80’s references on the last record, and melodically we get that sometimes too. It makes sense because that’s the kind of stuff I grew up on – The Smiths, The Cure, New Order, R.E.M and stuff like that. It’s never like, ‘oh, that’s really what we set out to do.’ Maybe it’s something like Yo La Tengo that’s a little bit more obvious about how they are an influence, as I’m really big fan of their records.
I think the strongest song on the new album is “Come Downstairs and Say Hello.” It starts off very Pet Sounds, with an orchestral ‘60’s vocal feel, and then mid-song it totally changes into this new-wave sounding tune, right in the middle of the song.
Yeah, that’s definitely my favorite song on the record, and I was really glad how that whole thing came together. We played it live the other night and it feels really great live.
Then the title song, “Keep It Together,” is very pop and happy. Sounds like that tune came together relatively easy
Well, yeah it’s a pretty straightforward pop song in that way.
“Careful” is perhaps a quintessential Guster tune, with built- up harmonies that encourage you to hum or sing along. At this point in the band’s career, how do you react to hearing that a particular sound is “quintessential Guster?”
Well, we have two versions of the record. The first version we finished last year and it didn’t have “Amsterdam,” “Careful,” “Keep It Together” or “Homecoming King” on it. We came back, and the record seemed a little dark to us, and there wasn’t some of that, sort of quintessential Guster sound, as those songs kind of bring the more poppy and the more immediate song. I think we set out to make a real deep and mature record, but it was a little off balance, so coming back and writing ” Careful,” “Amsterdam,” “Homecoming King,” and “Keep It Together,” kind of rounded up the album in a really good way.
Every song is a different experiment in itself, and it’s a record that you have to listen to numerous times to really “get.”
Oh, absolutely. I think that we were kind of bracing our fans for that a long time ago. This isn’t a record like Jason Mraz, where you will get the feel of the record pretty quickly. We tried to get every song to speak in a different way, and I think we really tried to set out to make a record that would grow and you’d hear something new each time you hear to it.
Does that make you nervous though, that some people may give up on it and not give it enough listens?
In some ways, we’re trying to say it’s a bit more challenging of a record, but that’s the kind of music that we want to make, and that’s the kind of music that lasts. There are people that think Parachute, our first record, is our best record, and although I respect their opinion, it’s just wrong (laughs). It’s not our best record and I would never want to make a record anywhere near what Parachute sounded like ever again. I don’t think it’s a very mature record and I don’t think it has that sort of depth. I don’t think twenty years from now…if you listen to the four records that we made, I think Keep It Together will sort of be the one that sounds the most classic.
Audience wise, it seems you are straddling a thin line between the improvisational taping community, and the Top 40 scene.
e’re a different band to classify. Like you said before, we kind of started off as a folk band, but the way we toured and the way we sold our own CD’s and then we were marketed as a “jamband,” but we don’t improvise ever. That was always weird for us to be there, and then writing pop songs that you can sing along to. I kind of consider ourselves a pop band at the heart of all this, and I get that question all the time, ‘what do you sound like?’ which is a difficult thing for us to kind of qualify, but I like to say we write three-and-a-half minute pop songs.
Some Pop rock groups, like Fountains of Wayne, have more of an indie rock attitude audience, but you have more of a young high-school/college audience. Is there an ideal audience that you would like to have?
You know, I love having seventeen-year old girls as fans (laughs), but that’s not exclusively our audience. But I also love to have our peers appreciate our music. I’d love for the people who have been listening to music for fifteen years, who are really critical, to find something on our albums that they enjoy, and I certainly think that this record is the closest to getting into the “Ben Folds” and the “Fountains” and the “Cakes” that make quirkier pop. I really admire those bands, and they are all really left of center, like ‘what kind of music do you play?’ I really feel those are our peers. I don’t know why we kind of caught on with seventeen-year old girls…[I suppose] partly because we did two months of touring with John Mayer and Fountains of Wayne didn’t. I don’t care, there are no ideal fans. I think a seventeen-year-old girl can feel music just as deeply as a thirty five year old rock critic.
Talking about quirkier rock acts, Ben Kweller is on a track on your new CD. Is this your first time collaborating?
We’ve been friends for a long time and that song just came out of a jam that we were doing in our rehearsal space. And he wrote that song in a couple hours late one night and we ended up liking it when we woke up in the morning.
You have a show coming up at Radio City Music Hall in August. The prestigious level that comes with playing that venue, is that the apex of your career so far?
It’s a big step for us and we’re a bit empowered by the whole thing, and I think it’s a statement. Yeah, I think it will probably be the biggest show we’ve played. Even something like last night (in Boston) where, depending on who you talked to said there were 45,000 people there, I mean that was kind of a big event, although we only played forty-five minutes and it was free. It wasn’t so much about taking people on a journey.
Do you feel as if your guitar playing has improved at all over the years?
I don’t really consider myself a guitar player, or I don’t really. None of us are particularly great at our instruments, although Brian is kind of an innovator in some ways. I think our focus has really been writing melodies, and that’s what I’m really good at. I would never consider myself a good guitar player or singer.
So, don’t you ever feel like you’re going to run out of chords?
Yeah, exactly (laughs). Well people have been writing pop songs for years, and we ran out of chords thirty five years ago, but we’re just putting new words over them.
Yeah, Neil Young uses the same chords over and over.
Yeah, he and [Tom] Petty. You ever hear that band the Raveonettes? That whole record is in the key of B flat, kind of funny.
What do you think it will take for Guster to be considered one of the great Boston bands in the line of the Lemonheads, Aerosmith, The Cars, and The Mighty Mighty Bosstones?
When we were growing up there, it was like The Lemonheads, Letters to Cleo, Buffalo Tom, and bands like that. I’m not sure. I think all that stuff will take care of itself. Our goal is to continue making really strong records, and playing politics is something we’ve never been interested in, so our goal is to keep making records and hopefully, those records will stand the test of time.
So maybe there’ll be a Guster star on the Tower Records Walk of Fame?
Exactly!
